Ron DeSantis in platform heels? Why size matters in politics

Donald Trump, like every successful bully, has a cruel genius for names – as Crooked Hillary, Sleepy Joe and Nervous Nancy will attest. Jeb Bush, his rival for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, never recovered from “Low Energy Jeb”. Elizabeth Warren stood little chance once her claims to Native American ancestry had her dubbed “Pocahontas”.

And yet Trump initially struggled with Ron DeSantis, his least serious and therefore most serious rival to the 2024 Republican presidential candidacy. “Meatball Ron” never quite pinged. “No Charisma Trump” was presumably dismissed out of hand.

But why go low when you can go lower? Tiny D! It’s Tiny D, isn’t it. Size, in Trumpland, matters. Trump also has “Liddle Mike Pence” and “Mini Mike Bloomberg” in circulation. And if you’re unwilling to go after DeSantis for naked greed, maliciousness, subverting democratic norms, etc – and you can see why Trump might be on shaky ground here – a slight on his manhood is clearly the way to go.

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“Tiny D” has clearly done the devil’s work as DeSantis’s size is now under scrutiny as never before. The Florida governor has been forced to insist that he really is 5ft 11in, as for weeks speculation has been mounting that he wears stealth heels concealed inside an ordinary-looking pair of shoes to compensate for his unstatesmanlike stature. On a recent podcast, DeSantis maintained that he was wearing “standard off-the-rack Lucchese” in a perplexing image that has been doing the rounds on social media. Experts, however, have disagreed. “[DeSantis] is wearing lifts; there’s no doubt,” one Texas shoemaker told Politico. Such lifts, artfully concealed inside specially adapted boots, are apparently as good as “five-inch stilettos”, he claimed.

Still, you’ve got to hand it to DeSantis. Otherwise he can’t reach. Sorry. What I meant to say is that if DeSantis is, indeed, a short man, then the smart move – clearly – is to be honest about it. After all, Trump is ample counterevidence that large stature and good leadership have zero correlation. Trump is 6ft 3in and the least popular and least effective American president in recent history, perhaps ever.

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Moreover, Emmanuel Macron (5ft 8in), Olaf Scholz (5ft 7in), Vladimir Putin (3ft 6in, okay 5ft 7in), Volodymyr Zelensky (5ft 7in) Giorgia Meloni (5ft 4in) and our very own Rishi Sunak (5ft 6in) are clear proof that diminutive stature is no impediment to winning power in the modern era.  Sunak is the shortest British male prime minister since Winston Churchill (5ft 5in). Scholz is the shortest German chancellor ever.

But this stands to reason. Politicians are often motivated by lifelong struggles; a disproportionately large number of MPs suffered the loss of a parent in childhood, for example. The shorter man – always the last to know when it rains – faces a constant, character-forming battle to be taken seriously. As such, he often emerges more dogged, more zippy, more determined than the complacently tall. He is capable of launching a genocidal war on a neighbouring country (Putin); repelling a genocidal war (Zelensky); or, say, going to Manchester to announce he is cancelling a long-planned high-speed rail line to Manchester and then wondering why everyone is booing (Sunak).

But, more broadly, in the wider culture, there has never been a better time to be short. This was the thrust of the American comedian Jaboukie Young-White’s viral tweet, which inaugurated the reign of the Short King. “I’m f***ing tired of short used as an insult,” Young-White wrote. “Short gave you Donald Glover. Short gave you Tom Holland. Short gave you Daniel Kaluuya. Short gave you Bruno f***ing Mars. Short kings are the enemy of body negativity, and I’ll be forever proud to defend them.” Cue a wave of appreciation for the abbreviated gentleman and ushering in a spring of “short kings”. “Guys over 6ft have no personality, short kings are always the funniest, trust,” was one female response.

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Short also gave us Napoleon – though the historian Andrew Roberts has argued that the French Emperor’s notorious lack of verticality was largely a projection of English cartoonists of the era. “He was 5ft 5in, which was the average height for a French adult male in those days, but because Gillray and Cruikshank wanted to make him out to be a little adventurer, they made him smaller in the caricatures than he actually was,” Roberts explained in an interview. But Roberts would say that. He’s 5ft 5in.

Nevertheless, it is in America, land of the XL, that men seem to be most sensitive about these matters. A 2011 study published in Social Science Quarterly asked 467 American students to draw their “ideal national leader” alongside a “typical citizen”. In 64 per cent of drawings, the leader was taller than the citizen. The psychologists behind the study speculated that we are evolutionarily hard-wired to confer authority onto the largest members of our tribe. And true to form, the average American presidential height is 6ft 0in – some three inches taller than the average American man.

Since 1900, the taller candidate has won in 21 out of 31 presidential elections. Viewed in this light, perhaps an underappreciated factor in the failure of Hillary Clinton to beat Donald Trump in 2016 was his 10-inch height advantage. That and the electoral college.

So how can DeSantis ride this one out? He could focus on Donald Trump’s small hands or his weird hair – but he seems unlikely to win a straight-up name-calling brawl. He could submit to a live measuring, much like Trump once did with his testosterone levels, but then again if those really are fake shoes that could backfire too. He could pump some campaign funds into recirculating those Tiny Trump memes from c.2017, in which a Lilliputian-sized Trump was photoshopped into various real-life presidential scenarios, somehow one of the truest accounts of his presidency. Worth considering?

And he could go high – but then, as we’ve established, this is Ron DeSantis we’re talking about. He might just be better off letting the insults go over his head. Easier for him.